‘The best, the only explanation of the psalms….is this: that [Christ’s] Humanity found in them a collection of appropriate devotions: Prayer-book, liturgy, hymn-book, fitted and pre-harmonised for a Divine Sufferer and Pilgrim…They are lyrics primarily of the Humanity of our Lord, secondarily of ours’.  ‘Read these psalms without this thought; they are petrifactions for a linguistic museum’.

In 1876, William Alexander, the Bishop of Derry (and future Archbishop of Armagh), made two predictions in his Bampton Lectures at Oxford University (later published as The Witness of the Psalms to Christ and Christianity).

The predictions are unrelated – other than that both have proved uncannily true.

The first was that progress won’t make people happy. The second was that if God’s people forgot that Christ was in the Psalter, it would become almost unheard in churches.

Progress Won’t Make Us Happy

According to the Bishop, modern science promised a future ‘City of God minus God; a Paradise minus the Tree of Life; a Millennium with education to perfect the intellect, and sanitary improvements to emancipate the body from a long catalogue of evils’.

 But what would be the result?

‘Sorrow, no doubt, will not be abolished; immortality will not be bestowed. But we shall have comfortable and perfectly drained houses to be wretched in’.

In words that could be applied to the internet:

‘The news of our misfortunes, the tidings that turn the hair white and half break the strong man’s heart, will be conveyed to us from the ends of the earth by the agency of a telegraphic system without a flaw’.

Yet on the bright side:

‘The closing eye may cease to look to the land beyond the River; but in our last moments we shall be able to make a choice between patent furnaces for the cremation of our remains, and coffins of the most charming description for their preservation when desiccated’.

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